A good summation of Chris Hedges’ main points in ‘Death of the Liberal Class’ was found on the blog Law and Disorder. I have edited, corrected and changed the list a bit. As wealth has concentrated and taken over every institution of society, social injustice has sky-rocketed. The ruling elite who are benefitting from the current paradigm are blind to its toxic byproducts. As discussed in my previous post, I see such violent outbursts of antisocial behavior as a result of the current system.

The 19-year-old suspect in the Boston Marathon bombings has told interrogators that the American wars in Iraq and Afghanistan motivated him and his brother to carry out the attack, according to U.S. officials familiar with the interviews.

The following bullet points will explain this belief further:

The pillars of liberal establishment, liberal religious institutions, labor, public education, esp. public universities, culture, the press and finally the Democratic Party, which made incremental or piecemeal reform possible – which watched out for the interests and the grievances of those outside of the narrow power elite – no longer function.

The term neo-liberalism is a reconfiguring of what it means to be a liberal in a democratic society. Neoliberalism is actually an ideology that prizes market fundamentalism and seeks a return to laissez-faire economics, i.e. unfettered capitalism. Community is devalued in favor of unregulated capitalism.

We have figures like Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, Pelosi and others that continue to speak in the values of social liberalism but have betrayed every one of those values.

The subservience to Wall Street, the slavish catering to the permanent war economy, the failure to defend basic civil liberties, including habeas corpus – all of these have ultimately been embraced by the majority of the power elite so that a liberal is indistinguishable from a conservative on the core structural issues.

The liberal class and liberal institutions are traditionally allowed to function in a capitalist democracy because when there is a crisis within the society, they perform as a formal channel or mechanism within the power structure for injustices to be alleviated.

The New Deal: perfect example of how the liberal class functions.

The interests of the financial elite have usurped all of the pillars of the liberal establishment.

What kept the liberal class honest in the past were the populist movements which held fast to moral imperatives.

With the open-ended ‘War on Terror’, a culture of permanent war psychosis has been institutionalized by America’s ruling elite. Under such an atmosphere, social norms have degenerated, opening the door to demagogues.

With this gradual coup, which corporations have carried out in the United States beginning with Reagan and accelerated by Clinton and Bush, and certainly further by Obama, we’re left powerless; we have no mechanism to fight back.

The ruling elite understood that people were not moved to act primarily by fact or reason but could be manipulated through emotion. This is the result – we live in a society utterly saturated with lies.

The liberal class has been reduced to the status of courtiers to the financial elite. The term ‘limousine liberals’ comes from this situation.

The corporate state is rapidly reconfiguring society into a form of neo-feudalism, where you have these speculators on Wall Street earning 900 thousand dollars an hour while at the same time you have families of four barely able to feed and sustain themselves. The ever-looming threat of medical bills is another scythe hanging over their heads.

The elite institutions of education which charge astronomical sums essentially provide education for the elite, while public education is gutted for the masses.

People are trained to work as cogs in the corporate structure. Inner city schools are turned into boot camps for the corporate machine; that’s what charter schools are about, along with the ability to break teachers unions.

Everybody has their place and a caste system is solidified. There’s no hope for escape. We are fed endless stories of the few rare exceptions of people breaking into the top 1%, to somehow make us think that we’re responsible for our own predicament.

The dismantling and co-opting of the liberal class by the financial elite is one of the most vicious things that has been visited upon the working class.

The weakening and dismantling of a true liberal class explains how we can stand by passively as millions of people are forced from their homes through foreclosures by banks, the wealth gap widens to even more grotesque disparities, and the environment is destroyed for short-term economic growth and profit.

As these grievances mount, there is no mechanism within the structures of power or traditional institutions by which these injustices can be ameliorated.

Social grievances become expressed in these very frightening proto-fascist movements, such as the Tea Party or right-wing demagogues and extremist groups who give legitimacy to this anger, rage and sense of betrayal.

While being cleverly deflected away from Wall Street, the anger of the disenfranchised is directed at government and the present-day hollow mirage of a “liberal class”. The hypocrisy of the so-called “liberal class” is readily apparent from those on the low-end of the economic spectrum.

I’ve often wondered why there are so many conspiracy theorists and paranoid thinkers in today’s society:

The Southern Poverty Law Center released a new report on Tuesday finding that “the number of conspiracy-minded antigovernment ‘Patriot’ groups reached an all-time high of 1,360 in 2012″ and that the number of hate groups has remained at “near record levels” of more than 1,000…. – source

If you have a mass media which is nothing more than a mouthpiece for the corporations and Empire, then the truth will be nearly impossible to discern. Such a society which cannot tell fact from propaganda or reality from fabricated illusions will be a breeding ground for conspiracy theorists and believers in the absurd. That’s exactly what we have today.

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About xraymike79

I'm a social critic, political/cultural commentator and artist. The modern industrial world is on the cusp of great changes to our current unsustainable way of life. Most people are oblivious to the paradigm shift that will occur, but some are starting to awaken to the fact that the future will not resemble the halcyon days of the last half century in America as evidenced by the OWS movement. My objective is to highlight important news stories and find the truth that is hidden behind what Joe Bageant called the American Hologram.
www.collapseofindustrialcivilization.com

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8 thoughts on “Why There Won’t Be a Revolution”

great post, been wondering where you were, you have hit all the major points.

“We are fed endless stories of the few rare exceptions of people breaking into the top 1%, to somehow make us think that we’re responsible for our own predicament.”

yes, yes, this is true enough, however, this could be expanded to point out that the truly wealthy are generally multi-generational, if they didn’t inherit, their parents had the cash to send them to Ivy League schools where they mix with the “right” kind of people. the other point is that the system itself works in such a way that for one to rise up thousands must be kept down, there is no win/win, this is total BS promulgated so that the elite can feel smug and self-satisfied. but you know all this.

a point of my own, the liberal class is very proud of their accomplishments in the area of civil rights, and there is nothing wrong with that, it’s just that they are a little too proud, and that is all they offer. the limousine liberals don’t offer reform of the corporate system, the financial system, nothing. we have had the war on poverty for 50 years and nothing has changed, this is because the parameters that create the conditions haven’t changed, but it does provide a constant issue for the supposed left to harp about, pretty sweet deal. it doesn’t do much good to be able to sit at the lunch counter if you don’t have money for lunch

your point about
“While being cleverly deflected away from Wall Street, the anger of the disenfranchised is directed at government and the present-day hollow mirage of a “liberal class”. The hypocrisy of the so-called “liberal class” is readily apparent from those on the low-end of the economic spectrum.”
you hit the nail on the head right there, i live among these poor folk and they are fooled left and right, the right-wingers blame “socialism”, the left blame the “repugliscum”, and they are both being played like puppets.

Forbes heralds that fact that “a record 70% of the Forbes listers are self-made.”

Yet their announcement obscures the fact that half of the top 10 on the Forbes list have inherited all or some of their wealth, making America’s billboard chart of opportunity look increasingly like the lucky sperm club.

Not sure how derivative of other writers your points are, but they’re well constructed. Bravo.

Regarding how “utterly saturated with lies” American life is, there’s actually a surprising amount of nuance to be teased out of this. Propaganda is old, but truth often wins out eventually. Maybe we’ve entered a new era where truth is permanently suppressed, maybe not. Maybe truth doesn’t even matter anymore. I’ve written about this in a blog post called Psychotic Knowledge (which is derivate of someone else’s writing). One might also distinguish between the lying liars telling lies and the wholly debased information environment that has evolved in the media, academy, and public sphere. Liars have agency and purpose, the environment is now simply the toxic air we breathe, and fewer people than ever can find their way through the fog.

The issues of wealth disparity, a de facto caste system despite the illusion of class mobility, and the disappearance of a true liberal class and with it mechanisms for dissent, reform, and political action (even revolution) are most concerning. I wish you had amplified the futility of resistance now that power alignments and configurations have solidified in favor of psychopaths. That’s why there will be no revolution. Well, that and our dependency on a narrowing set of corporations that now occupy (yes, occupy!) the entire field of play and have made the masses dependent on them for whatever scraps may fall from the table.

Truth is reality. Does truth matter? Well I’d say it does, especially if the continued existence of the human species depends on humanity recognizing the global effect of his industrial activities and the dangers of transgressing planetary environmental limits. I suppose many things, such as abject poverty, can be easily ignored and removed from one’s view when living behind the fortified walls of opulent mansions, but civilization-ending changes in the habitability of the planet might be hard to ignore, in time.

…There is nothing new in the phenomena of power arrogance and hubris. Since the earliest civilisations, rulers have made decisions and overreached their power in the confident belief that they had God on their side. In more modern times our rulers have believed that nature rewards the fittest, in other words, them.

Irrespective of what point in history they emerge, the starting point of most elites is the comfortable assumption that, as things have typically gone right for them in the past, they will continue to go right in the future. This belief is compounded by the fact that for a long time it has been the “little people” who bear the costs while those higher up the food chain reap the benefits. Power means that they are effectively cocooned from the negative kick-back from their actions. Long before the rulers themselves are successfully challenged and fall — and this typically happens only in the final stages — millions of others have already lost out badly and immense damage has been done.

What we term hubris is the cruel arrogance that arises from a failure of bottom-up feedback in systems where vast social and geographical distances exist between the powerful and the powerless. The punishment of Nemesis, the Greek goddess who was supposed to re-impose limits on those who overstepped their power, typically befalls entire societies before it befalls the rulers. Today the vast distance that separates the global elite from ordinary people is magnified further by the high-power technologies of communications, transport, production and weaponry. Nemesis, when she comes, will be global….

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OWS knows who really pulls the strings

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